Chapter 221 — Rescue
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 3 of 6
Lu Xueling's expression changed, and the hand touching the boards whipped back with lightning speed. Just as it withdrew, a mass of black qi burst violently from the spot her palm had touched, a ceaseless "hiss, hiss" filling the air as it burned like ghost-fire over that small patch—no flame at all, yet it burned into the wood a palm print the exact size of Lu Xueling's hand.
Inside the coffin, the witch-demon's heart went cold. The arts he practiced bore some resemblance to this restrictive demonic power, though their might was not to be compared; still, watching that colorless black fire flare up and die in an instant, he could not suppress a shudder. What would happen if that black fire touched flesh—he could more or less imagine. What he could not fathom was why, when he had hidden himself in this coffin earlier, the vicious, uncanny restriction had not stirred against him, and yet now that Lu Xueling had come, it proved so keen.
He was still wrestling with the question, unable to find an answer, when something seemed to come over him; he looked downward, and saw that the mysterious fat man beneath him appeared now, as the restrictions stirred, to be undergoing some strange transformation of his own.
A thick, murky yin energy welled up, a hundred times stronger than the faint presence of moments before, and at once filled the coffin they lay in to the brim. The witch-demon felt a great roar in his skull, as though his mind had gone blank in an instant; countless cold, venomous breaths bored into his body like vipers and clamped hard onto his meridians, leaving him in agony—yet he could not even cry out. For a time he felt he would sooner die than endure it.
And the source of this yin energy was none other than the mysterious fat man, radiating it from within his own body.
Lu Xueling stared at the black palm print, her face paling slightly. Behind her, some distance off, Xiao Bai slowly straightened, no longer leaning on the doorframe, her expression grave.
A moment later, Lu Xueling seemed suddenly to sense something; her body gave a jolt, her whole countenance changed—yet she did not retreat or dodge. Without the slightest hesitation she turned her wrist, and with a "clang" like a dragon's cry, faint rosy light blossomed and pale blue radiance flashed out in all directions, lighting the dark little room bright in an instant.
Tianxuan left its sheath!
Amid the rising auspicious vapor, the autumn-water longsword mirrored Lu Xueling's frost-and-snow face; the blade's light was like water too, rippling in midair like the spreading rings on an autumn pond. After a brief pause it multiplied into an endless host of sword-light phantoms and came slashing down upon the coffin.
Slashing—and yet it seemed to carry no power to cleave mountains or shatter stone. As the sword light swept near, something within the mysterious coffin seemed to sense the threat, and a fine crackling sound began to rise.
A mass of black qi burst abruptly from the coffin, as though it had substance, and actually caught the divine sword Tianxuan in midair. Lu Xueling's face shifted; with a clear, sharp cry she suddenly rose into the air, white robes fluttering like an immortal's.
Where she had stood, within a circle three feet across, a "hiss, hiss" broke out; that whole circular patch had been scorched beyond recognition by a black qi that had come from nowhere.
A smell of charring filled the little room.
Lu Xueling, still airborne, did not panic. The Tianxuan Divine Sword blazed with blue light, tracing a small half-circle in the air before stabbing downward.